Holy devastation, ad man. A little add-on to Firefox called Adblock Plus is getting
buzz in the blogosphere by allowing consumers to wipe off all forms of advertising from web pages. No more pop-ups, video-in-banners, refinance offers, or personalized text ads from Google. All gone.
What would happen if the gold rush of advertisers panning for consumers on the Internet went dry? Industry experts say web sites might have to make money the old fashioned way, by charging admission. Good news is it's an add-on, and not many consumers like mucking around with web browsers that work fine already, thank you. Bad news is 2.5 million people around the world have downloaded it already, and adoption is climbing at about 300,000 to 400,000 users per month.
One intriguing scenario is that if ad-blocking software did take off, search engine marketing (SEM) on Google might become even more dominant over banner advertising on web sites. Consumers punching keywords into search engines will still want to see
paid search results with the organic listings, because those little text ads match exactly what they are looking for. Banner advertisers and ad networks, with their very cool but intrusive behavioral targeting, might lose far more as nytimes.com fills up with lots of white space. And pity the poor newspapers, already hammered by falling advertising revenue in print, if their online slips too.
'Course, ad-blocking may white out SEM too. I'd give you a link to the Adblock site, but frankly, I'm too scared.
